Abel P. Upshur

Abel Parker Upshur (17 June 1790-28 February 1844) was US Secretary of the Navy from 11 October 1841 to 23 July 1843 (succeeding George Edmund Badger and preceding David Henshaw) and Secretray of State from 24 June 1843 to 28 February 1844 (succeeding Daniel Webster and preceding John C. Calhoun).

Biography
Abel Parker Upshur was born in Northampton County, Virginia in 1790, the son of a staunch Federalist and individualist. He became a lawyer in Richmond in 1810, and he practiced in Baltimore before returning to Virginia on the death of his father. He served in the House of Delegates in 1812, as Commonwealth's Attorney for Richmond from 1816 to 1823, in the state legislature to 1827, in the General Court in 1826, and in the State Constitutional Convention from 1829 to 1830. Upshur was a firm conservative and supporter of states' rights, and he defended South Carolina during the 1833 Nullification Crisis. In 1841, President John Tyler named Upshur Secretary of the Navy, and he sought to expand and modernize the service; he planned to increase it to at least half the size of the British Royal Navy. In 1843, after Daniel Webster's resignation as Secretary of State, Tyler appointed Upshur as his successor, and Upshur entered into talks with the Republic of Texas' ambassador Isaac Van Zandt about annexing Texas as a slave state, promising to send a US Navy fleet to the Gulf of Mexico to protect Texas against the Mexican Navy and for the federal government to assume Texas' debts in exchange. He also began negotiations for fixing the Oregon-Canada border with Britain. Sadly, on 28 February 1844, he was killed during an accidental cannon explosion in the USS Princeton disaster, which killed several other notables and miraculously left Tyler unscathed.